Sir Ken Robinson – MindShifthttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift
KQED Public Media for Northern CAFri, 09 Dec 2016 08:49:32 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2KQED Public Media for Northern CASir Ken Robinson – MindShiftKQED Public Media for Northern CAMindShiftSir Ken Robinson – MindShifthttp://u.s.kqed.net/2016/08/25/MindShiftiTunegraphic1400x1400.pnghttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift
Sir Ken Robinson: How to Create a Culture For Valuable Learninghttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/08/15/sir-ken-robinson-how-to-create-a-culture-for-valuable-learning/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/08/15/sir-ken-robinson-how-to-create-a-culture-for-valuable-learning/#commentsMon, 15 Aug 2016 08:40:34 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=46055There are still many disagreements about how to improve the education system so that children graduate with the skills and dispositions they will need to succeed in life. Education reform discussions often center on how to tweak existing mechanisms, but what if the system itself is creating the problems educators and policymakers are trying to solve? That’s the theory favored by author and TED-talk sensation Sir Ken Robinson.

“If you design a system to do something, don’t be surprised if it does it,” Robinson said at the annual Big Picture Learning conference called Big Bang. He went on to describe the two pillars of the current system — conformity and compliance — which undermine the sincere efforts of educators and parents to equip children with the confidence to enter the world on their own terms.

‘If you get preoccupied by a certain type of achievement then you don’t even look for other things people might be good at.’Sir Ken Robinson

Education has become a strategic priority for countries competing for an edge in a globalized economy. Political leaders know future generations need to be ready to take on an ever-evolving economy and that a nation’s prosperity depends on a prepared workforce. These concerns have led to more comparisons across countries and attempts within various countries to standardize the education each child receives.

The problem with this conformist approach, Robinson said, is that “human life is like the rest of life on earth; it is characterized by diversity.” Parents with more than one child know all too well that each can be radically different in temperament, personality and in their strengths and weaknesses. The same rules and parenting approach may work with one, but not the others. And yet this fundamental diversity in the human population is not honored within education. Instead, the curriculum has narrowed and now prioritizes a type of intelligence that favors academic work.

“There’s much more to human intelligence than a certain sort of academic work,” Robinson said. And, “if you get preoccupied by a certain type of achievement then you don’t even look for other things people might be good at.” Robinson points out that when the system narrowly defines success, it will exclude a huge portion of students who don’t happen to be good at those few valued skills.

“We marginalize other forms of intelligence; and it’s a big deal,” Robinson said. But if collectively those involved in the education system changed what it means to achieve in a way that honors the natural diversity of human life, many more people would see themselves as achievers and would push themselves beyond expectations set for them.

The other central tenet of today’s education system is compliance, which Robinson sees best reflected in the testing industry, a multibillion dollar business. But tests only measure what test-makers put on them, and how can such a small group of people know what will truly be useful to a student in a quickly-changing future? Robinson is troubled by the trend of adults in the current moment trying to predict the specific-knowledge students will need. The current focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) learning is a good example of adults looking at where jobs are right now and trying to make education fit. But who knows what other skills might be necessary 20 years from now?

“The real principle on which human life is based is organic growth and development,” Robinson said. It’s based on the need to invent your own life.” But the education system is not set up to allow for that kind of organic development, although Robinson acknowledges that many educators are doing their best to protect this form of learning. “They’re doing wonderful work because they believe in kids and the work, but they’re doing it against a headwind,” he said.

Part of the problem is the multitude of opinions and lack of clarity on exactly what it is an education should do. Debates about how to improve education will continue to rage because at a fundamental level participants don’t agree about why (or if) kids should go to school. Robinson firmly believes that creativity is a central element of what sets humans apart from other forms of life on earth and so educators’ mission should be to bring out the unique creative energy within each child.

Robinson believes education is “to enable students to understand the world around them, and the talents within them, so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.” He doesn’t deny that learning information about the world is important, but he says it’s equally important for students to understand their own talents, motivations and passions if they are going to lead lives that satisfy them. The current system of conformity and compliance leaves no space for this type of self-exploration.

“We spend more time talking about the outside world at school, but not enough time compelling the world within them,” Robinson said. But it’s the individual’s world view that ultimately determines whether that person stays in school, persists through challenges, feels motivated, interested, engaged and dedicated to work. And failing to focus on a sense of individual purpose could even be contributing to rising levels of depression seen in the US.

Robinson doesn’t deny that education has an economic purpose, and that it’s important for young people to become economically independent and self-sufficient. But to do that, he argues, they shouldn’t all learn the same thing. Instead, they should be learning to be adaptable, to be innovative, to flow with change, to collaborate and other globalized skills that will apply to whatever area of work they are passionate about pursuing. An education can help expose students to different life paths and support them in finding their passions, while giving them the transferable skills to attack any problem.

CULTIVATING GROWTH

The education system is commonly compared to mechanization, a “factory-model,” designed to push cookie-cutter children through in age-based batches. Robinson finds industrialized farming to be a better metaphor because it deals with living organisms. Farmers went from an organic model of farming that prioritized crop diversity, rotation and fertile soil to a system of monocrops that easily fall prey to pests, which in turn are killed with chemicals. The focus is on output and yield, which increased with chemical fertilizers. This system does what it was designed to do — it produces a lot of food, but at the expense of the environment.

Similarly, the education system has focused on increasing the number of high school graduates, the output, with no concern for whether they become happy, fulfilled human beings.

“The way you increase the quality of our children’s experience, their life chances, it’s not by focusing on yield, but on focusing on the culture of the school,” Robinson said. A healthy mix of mentorship, arts, physical education, academic subjects and more creates the “healthy soil” in this analogy, the environment in which kids can flourish. Author Paul Tough also talked about strong learning environments as the key element to success in his book Helping Children Succeed.

Robinson said when schools get the culture part right they become an important asset for the community around them. “Great schools enrich the entire neighborhood, the entire ecosystem,” Robinson said. But “schools that don’t get their role in the community can drain the life force out of the community.” The best schools develop the human resources of the community to further more investment, pride and high expectations.

“We spend so much time containing and constraining our teachers and students who have so much talent,” Robinson said. And while some parts of the conformist and compliance-based system are unavoidable, other parts are perpetuated by well-meaning educators simply because that’s the way things have always been done. Robinson is calling on all educators to look at the available resources differently, more creatively, and to use them to create learning environments that allow individual students to thrive and flourish.

Let me say a few words about creativity. I’ve written a lot about this theme in other publications. Rather than test your patience here with repetition of those ideas, let me refer you to them if you have a special interest. In Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, I look in some detail at the nature of creativity and how it relates to the idea of intelligence in the arts, the sciences, and other areas of human achievement. In 1997, I was asked by the U.K. government to convene a national commission to advise on how creativity can be developed throughout the school system from ages five through eighteen. That group brought together scientists, artists, educators, and business leaders in a common mission to explain the nature and critical importance of creativity in education. Our report, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, set our detailed proposals for how to make this happen in practice and was addressed to people working at all levels of education, from schools to government.

It’s sometimes said that creativity cannot be defined. I think it can. Here’s my definition, based on the work of the All Our Futures group: Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

There are two other concepts to keep in mind: imagination and innovation. Imagination is the root of creativity. It is the ability to bring to mind things that aren’t present to our senses.

Creativity is putting your imagination to work. It is applied imagination. Innovation is putting new ideas into practice. There are various myths about creativity. One is that only special people are creative, another is that creativity is only about the arts, a third is that creativity cannot be taught, and a fourth is that it’s all to do with uninhibited “self-expression.”

None of these is true. Creativity draws from many powers that we all have by virtue of being human. Creativity is possible in all areas of human life, in science, the arts, mathematics, technology, cuisine, teaching, politics, business, you name it. And like many human capacities, our creative powers can be cultivated and refined. Doing that involves an increasing mastery of skills, knowledge, and ideas.

Creativity is about fresh thinking. It doesn’t have to be new to the whole of humanity— though that’s always a bonus— but certainly to the person whose work it is. Creativity also involves making critical judgments about whether what you’re working on is any good, be it a theorem, a design, or a poem. Creative work often passes through typical phases. Sometimes what you end up with is not what you had in mind when you started. It’s a dynamic process that often involves making new connections, crossing disciplines, and using metaphors and analogies. Being creative is not just about having off-the-wall ideas and letting your imagination run free. It may involve all of that, but it also involves refining, testing, and focusing what you’re doing. It’s about original thinking on the part of the individual, and it’s also about judging critically whether the work in process is taking the right shape and is worthwhile, at least for the person producing it.

Creativity is not the opposite of discipline and control. On the contrary, creativity in any field may involve deep factual knowledge and high levels of practical skill. Cultivating creativity is one of the most interesting challenges for any teacher. It involves understanding the real dynamics of creative work.

Creativity is not a linear process, in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started. It is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery of skills and concepts. It is not true that they have to be mastered before the creative work can begin. Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline. Many people have been put off by mathematics for life by endless rote tasks that did nothing to inspire them with the beauty of numbers. Many have spent years grudgingly practicing scales for music examinations only to abandon the instrument altogether once they’ve made the grade. The real driver of creativity is an appetite for discovery and a passion for the work itself. When students are motivated to learn, they naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done. Their mastery of them grows as their creative ambitions expand. You’ll find evidence of this process in great teaching in every discipline from football to chemistry.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/04/22/sir-ken-robinson-creativity-is-in-everything-especially-teaching/feed/17Ken Robinson Creative schools coverSir Ken Robinson: How to Escape Education’s Death Valleyhttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/05/28/sir-ken-robinson-how-to-escape-educations-death-valley/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/05/28/sir-ken-robinson-how-to-escape-educations-death-valley/#commentsTue, 28 May 2013 20:51:45 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=28761The ever eloquent Sir Ken Robinson contends in this TED Talk that the culture of American education contradicts three principles that make human life thrive: diversity, curiosity and creativity. Humans naturally embody those qualities, but school has become a system based on conformity and testing, qualities that don’t use the natural learning tendencies inherent within every child.

He makes an argument for individualizing learning, but also for valuing teachers and thinking of their professional development as an investment in children and the future.

Kicking off the big event, where crowds overflowed from one packed room to another, Sir Ken Robinson, renowned author and international education adviser, proposed the idea that technology is not the only driver for learning.

“The problem now is resisting the notion that technology is the answer to everything — it’s clearly not,” Robinson said. “But what part of the equation does technology best speak to?”

Robinson, who’s been outspoken about the need to change the education paradigm, emphasized that educators shouldn’t be pushing (or be pushed toward) the gratuitous use of technology. He posed thought-provoking questions that got to the heart of what every stakeholder in education wants: what does it take to engage students — not just within a standardized curriculum, but in their own learning? What are the roles of technology in doing this? And what are the implications when it comes to implementing practices and policies?

“We should get rid of the words ‘curriculum delivery.’ It’s an art form to teach.”

In the hunt to find the next Holy Grail in education technology, Robinson said we may be losing sight of what teachers are best at.

“We should get rid of the words ‘curriculum delivery,'” he said, referring to the multitudes of tech platforms. “It’s an art form to teach, the judgement of what might work today may not work tomorrow.”

Teachers are the connective tissue in helping kids find not just subjects at which they test well, but what they’re passionate about, he said. “You often don’t know what you’re passionate about because you haven’t been introduced to it in the right way,” he said. “Teachers provide that stewardship we need,” he said.

For teachers, helping kids find their passion outside the confines of standardized curriculum and testing can be a messy endeavor, but worth the challenge. Marc Prensky, author of the book BRAIN GAIN: Technology and the Quest for Digital Wisdom, added that, rather than finding different ways for everyone to do the same curriculum, we need to find a way to allow individual students to create their own pathways to learning.

Though technology could help in this realm, the value that great teachers bring to the equation is immeasurable against what software can do, Prensky said: providing empathy and helping students find their passion by providing a wider place to look.

“Helping students find their passion will lead them to achievement,” he said.

Ever the pithy presenter, Prensky proposed to the audience four ways teachers can do this.

LISTEN. It’s impossible to encourage students when we don’t know what their passions are, so above all, teachers must listen to their students. “Or else what we get is ‘cellophane kids,’ when a teacher looks right through them to the curriculum and test scores and kids become invisible,” he said.

RESPECT. Adults and kids don’t respect each other as much as they should, Prensky said. “The war between digital natives and immigrants is over, and the natives have won! So let’s move forward to mutual respect and wisdom,” he said. We need both technology and strong pedagogy, but we need to include kids’ voices in how we make decisions about learning. “All education decisions come top down right now,” he said. “The next century is about changing that.”

OVER-EXPECT FROM STUDENTS. Today’s kids have far greater capabilities than ever been before, not less. “What’s making them better is connecting their brains to technology wisely,” he said. Let’s step up our expectations of them in that regard.

DO WHAT YOU KNOW IS RIGHT. “Teachers know what kids need, but someone has convinced them to just cover the curriculum,” he said. A teacher’s job is to help equip kids with skills to function and thrive in the digital future, and though that could be challenging because of conflicting policies in place, that’s the definition of courage.

In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson presented a TED talk about the importance of nurturing creativity in education. That video has been viewed more than eight million times.

Just a few weeks ago, Robinson presented a video TEDx talk in London, addressing how population growth and technology are fueling huge changes in education, and the imperative to make all schools progressive. He argues that the principles of what’s considered “alternative” education are those that should be applied to mainstream education.

It’s hard to argue with these ideas.

]]>https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/01/02/sir-ken-robinson-alternative-education-is-good-education/feed/6Screen shot 2012-01-02 at 10.44.38 AMSir Ken Robinson Changes the Paradigmhttps://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2010/12/27/sir-ken-robinson-changes-the-paradigm/
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2010/12/27/sir-ken-robinson-changes-the-paradigm/#commentsMon, 27 Dec 2010 17:00:21 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/?p=5765Continue reading Sir Ken Robinson Changes the Paradigm→]]>Sir Ken Robinson’s inspirational talk at the RSA Conference called “Changing Paradigms” has made its way around the education circles through different media.

This animated version of the speech, taking us through the speaker’s colorful prose with illustrations, has made even more of an impact.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth watching from beginning to end. Thanks to my daughter’s teacher, Ms. K., for passing it on.